I figured I would go out on a high note so I picked the nonverbal chapter. Simply stated, this has to do with how you observe people without worrying about what they say, it’s how they say it. No one really wants me to type out this whole blog post about Star Wars since we just did so much nonverbal crap in class, so I won’t. It’s so much easier to tell what a person thinks by what a person has on their face instead of what they say, such as when a person compliments you. It’s easy to tell if they are being sarcastic with the comment or if it’s something actually sincere. Another wee thing to talk about is how a person’s eyes react. An example of this include when you are telling a very important and sad story and the other person keeps eye contact and nods ever so often. You can also tell if a person is paying attention by what the eyes are doing. This includes if eye contact is being made or if they are just staring off into space with not a care in the world. I guess that another quick important piece is being sensitive to people when they use a nonverbal cue. This includes when someone is upset or purposely trying to bring you down. It’s also important to properly decode a message. This includes things such as the situation the person is in, what the message is, and the face they have while they do it.
Me Voting
Week 12: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 4
I hate the very first part of this chapter. Happy Holidays and Season’s Greetings just piss me off; people have no right to complain about Merry Christmas. Oh boo hoo, you don’t celebrate Christmas, doesn’t mean you have to try to ruin it for the rest of the people. I enjoy how we are properly talking about the language, on another not so angry side of me. Here we are about how words are symbolic and only represent the objects or ideas that they are. An example was the use of the word textbook. The word itself means the books with profound knowledge used in a class setting but the word only represents that, it is not a textbook just a word. Also how words are different in varying cultures. I really like what it had to say in this little part about being bound by context and culture. The book says that if there was a culture without a word for envy, then no one would experience it because you must have a word to describe what you feel. It even goes as far to point out how biased we are over names, especially if the name seems to be a non-white name. I can vouch for the book and agree that I’m guilty of discrimination just over a name before. We even point out how credibility affects the listeners. Blah blah, people who are doctors know more about medicine, baristas know coffee. Dialects are probably the worst thing for me when it comes to credibility. Seeing as how I’m a southerner at heart I’m a complainer when it comes to northerners in my land.
Week 11: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 3
Here we are working on how we perceive other human beings. It’s a pretty big deal when it comes down to deciding who we want to be friends with, who we want to marry, and we want associated with us. It’s all about how we perceive each other. Selection is where we start, which is simple. It has to do with how we perceive things such as the way people treat us or how we remember things about people. Then we get to have organization, which is so much better. This is where we piece together the information about people. More like how we take what we know and start to assume things about people. Interception is where you take that information and figure out how it means to you as a person. A good example is the whole “how a person treats you.” You like to pay attention to how people treat you to know if they want to be your friend or if they want the dick. I didn’t have to read the book to realize that these all overlap and we use them all the time. How else would we make friends? Not only is there this stuff but also how we misinterpret. Such as the differences between cultures or how we see what people do when they are away from others. Stereotyping is especially used here; such as how I tend to be a douche to certain peoples friends if their friend is a douche. It’s also important and I’m glad that the book said it, is the ending of a conversation. We all know we have to start very cool and awesome but it’s also good to end that way as well. I mean, who would want to end like the Sopranos just in the midd
Week 10: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 2
So here we are with culture and how different people fit in, starting with in-groups and out-groups. In and out-groups are what we’re in or not in, like countries, counties, regions, social groups, and religion. Going to a foreign country puts you in the out-group; you’re in a whole different place where different things are considered the norm. This especially goes toward religion; most of religious people see the others as foolish. Those who follow one faith cannot see how anyone could follow something else or not believe in general. One bad thing about it is if people look badly at a group, such as Muslims. The book talked about 911 and all that business, no need to explain because we all make the jokes about turbans. We even go a little deeper by putting co-cultures in our cultures. Yo dawg, I heard you like cultures and cultuception is happening here. This is where we divide people up more along the lines of interests. Maybe you have friends who are in a chess club or society, kind of lame but that is their co-culture. I’m more of a gamer and meme guy and I tend to associate with those more like me, so that’s the people I have in my co-culture. I’m glad the book pointed out individualistic and collectivistic societies. Obviously we are very individualistic here but say over in Japan, it’s not all about themselves as singles but as a whole. I can’t really say which one is better in the long run since both have their own pros and cons but I feel like I think collectivistic is better but I’m very individualistic. We even get to low power and high power distance cultures, oh the joy. I like how we make ourselves feel like a low power and that we’re all even, of course we are better than most countries about that since some are ruled by a select group. It’s just fun to see how much control we don’t have over a county while pretending to still be the top of the top.
Week 9: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 15
Oh those fancy persuasive speeches, making me blush and what not. Oddly enough, this chapter is the one that talked about ethos, pathos, and logos which our group has talked about so much. I’ve never got the chance to point them out in the blog yet, I think. I don’t believe I need to explain them again but they do relate to my life since I’ve had to somewhat follow them as I’ve done my multiple speeches already. Something I haven’t ever pointed out though is inductive and deductive reasoning, which are both reasoning just from different directions. Inductive goes from specific to general while deductive goes from general to specific. Even though we in class didn’t use reasoning during our speeches per say or maybe we did, who knows, but anyway we didn’t use something deductive because I know we were general to specific if the speeches were correct. I’ve done plenty of persuasive speeches in my time, like when we did a fake type of court for speech before and I got to be the defense attorney both times. Pretty badass if I do say so myself, I had to be persuasive to have the class believe me and take my side which would mean I needed them to say my client was innocent. The chapter even points out Monroe’s Motivated Sequence; this is good since we are not prepping for that Halloween speech. Speaking of which, I have a good costume planned out. I like that the chapter actually pointed out logical fallacies. I have to quote this “If we allow gay marriage, pretty soon we’ll be legalizing polygamy and allowing people to marry animals.” Damn what a nice book. How many times have I heard some kind of fallacy like this? Too many times and I’m glad the book says that it’s quite stupid. I see where it also talked about hasty generalizations and lowering the drinking ago. I know you wouldn’t like that since you don’t want even younger people at the bar with you .
Week 8: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 14
I believe we have done some kind of speech explanation or something of the like by now so now we’ve moved on to informative speeches. Obviously this is where you explain things, who knew right? One of the simplest things anyone can do while giving said speech is defining something or doing better explanations to further make your subject known. An example the book gave was to define the term FICO Score, I have no clue what that is but it’d be a good idea to use it if you’re doing a speech about credit scores and the like. Another thing that informative speech can be used for is to explain something, not a big deal, just talk about how something works or why something happened. You can easily handle that at any point in your life. I’ve done this stuff before and eh, not really that exciting. Demonstrating is another way for you to inform people, again, simple whatnots. We had people do that in class and it was pretty simple. Even though, most of their times were not right in the time frame but it’s not the hardest thing anyone has ever done. One way to make it fun is to do something of use. That means doing a topic that is actually quite interesting and people actually care about it. The stuff in class didn’t necessarily entertain me very much and even though they were good, they were just another speech. I’m not saying I could do a better job or do anything worthwhile, but still, eh. The moral of this part is that we need more interesting speech ideas; I used to have good ones in high school but college made me boring so I can’t be of assistance either. Hopefully, some of us will do entertaining speeches this next time so that we have a bit more fun.
Week 7: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 13
There are many, many, many, different kinds of speeches that people can make professionally or just in their spare time for experience. Such examples like the ones we have done in class. This includes our group speeches, the impromptu speeches, as well as our somewhat memorized speech. I actually did do mine memorized because I work less efficient with notes. If I was to have one then I would look at it too much and not focus on the audience and probably start to lose myself more than just keeping it all in my noggin. The best part about a speech is when stage fright takes over. I don’t want to name any names but there is one guy in class where I don’t think its stage fright but he does use a monotonous tone and that really gets on my nerves. Granted that pacing is my nervous thing to do, I just feel natural moving around instead of staying in one spot, unless this is something where I must stay behind like a podium or some structure. Nervousness can stop me from getting myself up there and doing my best but once I am up and can get talking I feel like I could do it all day and stage fright is completely gone. In all honesty, with my major I could be a radio personality and I would love to learn how to become a better speaker. When it comes down to posture, it can be difficult for me to stand up straight and be all perfect solely because of my lack of back muscles, you should have noticed this by now since I am quite skinny. One thing I am proud of is that I look around the room and make eye contact with everyone at some point.
Week 6: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 12
Here we are at my sweet, sweet baby, chapter 12. This one is pretty much making your speech appeal to the masses and how to prepare for it; even giving the example of A Time to Kill which I haven’t seen so thanks for the spoiler alert book. There wasn’t even a damn warning for it so I’m kind of mad. First off, we have thesis time. In all honesty, we all know what that is and have had to do it so many times for English. This is also the most important part of the speech since it’s what everything revolves around. Once you have that and start putting your speech together, you have to remember to have an introduction, body, and conclusion. This is just like any paper we’ve had to write and really isn’t that bad, the only difference is that you’re going to do more talking and less reading. The introduction should obviously state your thesis and gain interest in your speech. If you don’t make it interesting then why would anyone ever listen to you? Then get your speech together and talk about your thesis and close it up. No point in going on for this whole blog about how to write a speech, that’s just stupid. Now I took AP English in high school and so I’ve written so many essays so this is very obvious stuff. I’ve written outlines, prepared speeches, and had to do it in MLA and APA. Citing is easy anyway, since we’ve also done it in class already. Since we’ve recently done the group speeches support was needed. We had to gather up simple stuff from the internet or books so we could point out what we needed to get a better grade. Credibility is a super important piece of material. I like to think I am but who the hell knows, I like how plagiarism was even talked about because it is pretty dumb. One girl in my AP class copy and pasted from Wikipedia and didn’t even change the font or font size so it was too easy to notice. I don’t even see the point of just taking so many different ideas for your own, usually it’s really easy to notice and I would rather not be kicked out of college. Mainly because I have to pay and do all that poop.
Week 5: If My Life Were a Textbook, Chapter 11
Chapter 11 really does have something to do with my life as of now considering the fact that we are currently doing speeches. Obviously we talk for the known reasons like entertaining or honoring or the different speeches we do in class. To make sure we know what’s going on when we have to prepare properly, such as knowing our topic and audience. This time the audience is just our fellow classmates but of course that varies all the time. I’ve spoken in front of different classes, clubs, the band, and my entire school at different points of my life, honestly not really that hard, you just have to know when you can be more laid back and when to be funny. Topics are a different thing. They could be anything and it’s always important to study it so you don’t look like a fool. I won’t pretend to be an expert speaker but we did debate in high school and this one girl was just so stupid with arguing. All me and my partner did was poop all over and her dreams, she had done no research what so ever and very obviously made up her statistics. It doesn’t feel good if the audience or fellow debated can tell you have no idea what’s going on. It’s not always the best option to trust every little thing you find online either. Some of them no one would know if you were wrong but if you name of Wikipedia as a source you do look pretty foolish. It’s not like I’ve never used it just to find something simple out but I would never say that in my speech, most people would think something like that out well before deciding to do it. Libraries would be the best option for learning around most things; books are pretty useful.
Dirty Old Men Need Love, Too 